Keynote speakers

Prof Kleine

Dorothea Kleine is Professorial Research Fellow at the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, and leads the Digital Technologies, Data and Innovation Research Theme at the Sheffield Institute for International Development. She is the Chair of the Digital Geographies Working Group of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers. She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and before joining Sheffield, she worked at Cambridge, Bonn and Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research investigates sustainable human development, global justice, and the role of digital technologies in making progress towards these aims. Dorothea Kleine has published widely on both the potential and the ethical challenges of the use of ICTs in human development in both the global South and North, focusing in particular on the perspective, agency and creativity of the more marginalised, including rural micro-entrepreneurs, women, and youth from favelas (“slums”). She is also well-known internationally for her theoretical work, proposing the choice framework to apply the capabilities approach to digital development, as laid out in ‘Technologies of Choice’ (MIT Press). Much of her work is participatory and co-produced with community organisations and other non-academic stakeholders.

Prof Singleton

Alex Singleton is Professor of Geographic Information Science at the University of Liverpool, where he entered as a lecturer in 2010. He holds a BSc (Hons) Geography from the University of Manchester and a PhD from University College London. To date, his research income totals around £15m, with two career highlights including the ESRC funded Consumer Data Research Centre and the recently awarded ESRC Centre for Doctoral Training in New Forms of Data. Alex’s research is embedded within the Geographic Data Science Lab and concerns various aspects of urban analytics. In particular, his work has extended a tradition of area classification within Geography where he has developed an empirically informed critique of the ways in which geodemographic methods can be refined for effective yet ethical use in public resource allocation applications. He recently co-authored the book ‘Urban Analytics’ (Sage).

Prof Yuan

Rethink GIS Research

From the very beginning, GIS (or GIScience) research has been able to leverage exciting advances and opportunities in other fields. On the one hand, GIS research addresses distinct characteristics of spatial data and how spatiality may influence the entire process of geographic knowledge production. On the other hand, GIS research may appear modish with titles that amend geo, spatial, or geospatial to whatever buzzword of the day. When considering both the uniqueness and trendiness of GIS research, one would ask whether the uniqueness remains prominent in the rapid shifts of fashionable GIS topics, or whether the trendy shifts lead to shallow, inconsequential findings. The premise here is that the time-honored British rhyme: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a sixpence in your shoes, provides a good guideline to develop healthy GIS research: maintain continuity to the established knowledge, offer new ideas and methods, leverage concepts and innovations from other disciplines, advance the core GIS knowledge, and a wish for broad impacts from our research. In this talk, we will discuss the old, the new, the borrowed, the blue, and the grand wishes in GIS research and the promises of GIS research in the coming new era.

Short biography
May Yuan received all her degrees in Geography: B.S. 1987 from National Taiwan University and M.S. 1992 and PhD 1994 from State University of New York at Buffalo. She is Ashbel Smith Professor of Geospatial Information Sciences and GIS PhD director in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. Before she joined UT-Dallas in August 2014, she was Brandt Professor and Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor and Director of Center for Spatial Analysis at the University of Oklahoma (1994-2014). Currently, she is the Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Geographical Information Science and Vice President of US Cartography and Geographic Information Society. In addition, she serves on the US NOAA Environmental Information Services Working Group and US National Geospatial Advisory Committee. Her research interest expands upon space-time representation and analytics to understanding geographic dynamics. Over the years, she has been working to develop new approaches to represent geographic processes and events in GIS databases to support space-time query, analytics, and knowledge discovery. Her research has been supported by NSF, NASA, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, United States Geological Survey, National Institute of Standards and Technology and state government agencies in the U.S.A. She recently founded the Geospatial Analytics and Innovative Applications (GAIA) Lab at UT-Dallas. She and her students are exploring ways to capture and apply the concepts of place for space-time representation and analysis.

Prof Zipf

Alexander Zipf is chair of GIScience (Geoinformatics) at Heidelberg University (Department of Geography) since late 2009. He is member of the Centre for Scientific Computing (IWR), the Heidelberg Center for Cultural Heritage and founding member of the Heidelberg Center for the Environment (HCE). From 2012-2014 he was Managing Director of the Department of Geography, Heidelberg University. In 2011-2012 he acted as Vice Dean of the Faculty for Chemistry and Geosciences, Heidelberg University. Since 2012 he is speaker of the graduate school CrowdAnalyser – Spatio-temporal Analysis of User-generated Content. He is also member of the editorial board of several further journals and organized a set of conferences and workshops. 2012-2015 he was regional editor of the ISI Journal Transactions in GIS (Wiley). Since 2017 he is Associate Editor of the Open Access Journal Geo-Spatial Information Science (GSIS) published by Taylor & Francis. Before coming to Heidelberg he led the Chair of Cartography at Bonn University and earlier was Professor for Applied Computer Science and Geoinformatics at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany. He has a background in Mathematics and Geography from Heidelberg University and finished his PhD at the European Media Laboratory EML in Heidelberg where he was the first PhD student. There he also conducted further research as a PostDoc for 3 years.

sponsored by

Data Challenge alert!: @CDRC_UK are collaborating with @GISRUK to host a data challenge on...#Brexit! Four finalists will be in with a chance to present their findings to #GISRUK2018 delegates with one winning £500. Find out more: https://t.co/m9JBZQjp1N

We are delighted to announce the first of our keynotes: Prof May Yuan @EPPSUTDALLAS will be discussing the old, the new, the borrowed, the blue, and the grand wishes in #GIS research and the promises of #GIS #research in the coming new era. https://t.co/XT1kDAlWKJ #GISRUK2018

We're collaborating with @GISRUK to host a data challenge on...#Brexit! Four finalists will be in with a chance to present their findings to #GISRUK2018 delegates with one winning £500. To enter & T&Cs https://t.co/hnXoCRNj9C